Monday, October 2nd, 2017

One of the things we’d hoped to enable via Web Components was a return to ctrl-r web development. At some level of complexity and scale we all need tools to help cope with code size, application structure, and more. But the tender, loving maintainance of babel and webpack and NPM configurations that represents a huge part of “front end development” today seems…punitive. None of this should be necessary when developing one (or a few) components and composing things shouldn’t be this hard. The sophistication of the tools needs to get back to being proportional with the complexity of the problem at hand.

Saturday, August 12th, 2017

Monica explains how Shadow DOM could be the perfect answer for scoping CSS:

We didn’t have style encapsulation, so we started naming things “the right way” with BEM, so that we didn’t accidentally stomp over each other’s styles. We wanted to be able to author CSS from inside a JavaScript component, so we started using CSS-in-JS. We needed all these tools, because “the platform” (read: the browsers that be) wasn’t there, and building these tools showed that there was a need to move forward. For style encapsulation, Shadow DOM is the platform moving forward.

Although, in a way, Shadow DOM is also another flavour of CSS-in-JS:

Before you complain that using a Shadow DOM and Web Components means that it absolutely requires JavaScript: this is true.

Monday, June 12th, 2017

A really great introduction to web components by Monica. But I couldn’t help but be disheartened by this:

Web components tend to have dependencies on other web components, so you need a package manager to herd all them cats.

For me, this kind of interdependence lessens the standalone nature of web components—it just doesn’t feel quite so encapsulated to me. I know that this can be solved with build tools, but now you’ve got two problems (and one more dependency).

Friday, February 11th, 2011

On 18 May 2010, the Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) Project deposited a time capsule in the vaults of datacenter, Swiss Fort Knox, in Saanen, Switzerland. It contained the decoding information for five digital file formats on media ranging from paper, microfilm and floppy discs to CDs, DVDs and USB sticks.

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

As is now traditional, there will be a BarCamp in Brightonstraight after dConstruct. This year it’s happening at a new venue, the Old Music Library in the middle of town—right across from the Brighton Dome, venue for dConstruct. The first batch of tickets went on sale yesterday but there’ll be more to come (if you don’t fancy playing web booking roulette, a sure-fire way of getting a ticket is to contribute to sponsoring the event).

If you’re coming to Brighton for dConstruct, I highly recommend staying for the weekend and sleeping over at BarCamp.

If you’re not coming to Brighton for dConstruct, why not? Haven’t you seen the line-up? It’s going to be fantastic.

Take a look around you. What do you see that you would like to preserve for the future? Take a picture of it, upload that picture to Flickr and tag it with dconstructcapsule.

The ticket you could win is no ordinary ticket. It’s a VIP ticket that will get you into dConstruct itself, two nights in a luxury hotel in the centre of Brighton, and a place at the speakers’ dinner the evening before the conference.

Even without the competition aspect, I think this is a pretty nifty project. People have already posted some great items:

This used to be cool. I think it still is.

The infamous red ring of death. A symbol of recreation in the naughties and a beacon of utter despair.

…though my oboe is a product of centuries of instrument making techniques and technology rather than something new, it’s certainly something (along with the skills that made it) that I believe needs preserving for the future as an example of beautiful design and craft.

Clever future-people! Please clone this fruit—it’s a design classic (iconic styling, great usability), it’s nutritious, and it’s tastier than the bland efficiency-gruel you slurp down the rest of the space-week.